Seabird families

Mr Peter Kappes

My research interests focus on the ecology, management, conservation, and restoration of seabird populations and the role marine birds play in island ecosystems. I am particularly interested in understanding how variation in life histories, survival, and reproductive success at the individual-level is related to population-level trends and developing tools to better understand and model this relationship in order to inform management scenarios.

For my PhD research, I am working with the PenguinScience team (http://www.penguinscience.com/) to investigate how Adélie penguins breeding at three different colonies on Ross Island, Antarctica respond to climate change at the individual, colony, and metapopulation levels. This includes describing individual variation in age-specific and lifetime reproductive success and how sea ice conditions in the Ross Sea influence this variation. Using the individual based population modeling program HexSim (http://www.hexsim.net/), I will develop an individual based model that will incorporate variation in individual adaptive behaviors and life histories in order to better understand how this variation “emerges” as population-level trends for this metapopulation.